A Harvest of Secrets(76)
For a full minute Paolo didn’t answer her, didn’t even turn his head. She watched him in the moonlight, waiting. La pazienza dei contadini was a phrase one often heard. The patience of the peasants. Vittoria could almost hear her mother saying it, and she wondered what torments her mother had lived with, what kind of coldness or fear or societal chains had kept her from seeking out the man she loved and speaking with him, having one conversation at least, explaining, asking forgiveness. She wondered, over all those years, with Paolo so wounded that he eventually refused even to look in her direction, what measure of guilt her mother had felt. Guilt, doubt, confusion, shame, regret. She wondered if her father had sensed the truth, or discovered it.
She would never know.
At last, Paolo swallowed and coughed once. “Sì,” he said into the night, his voice tight with an old, long-subdued sorrow, “dirlo non potevo. Ma ogni giorno potevo vederti.”
Yes, I couldn’t speak of it. But every day I was able to see you.
He’d used the ti with her, the informal pronoun. A first.
Vittoria felt that ti echoing inside her. She shifted the beads, reached over and rested a hand on her father’s arm, just inside the elbow. She squeezed once, then took her hand away and felt, in spite of everything that had happened on that day, and everything happening in the world around her, something that resembled peace.
Epilogue
Even though they’d been at Lake Como for the better part of a month, Paolo found that he still wasn’t comfortable sleeping in the enormous house that had belonged to Vittoria’s godfather. He’d killed the man, for one thing; the guilt of that act still tormented him. And, for another, the bedroom there was far too rich for his blood and bones. Vittoria seemed to feel perfectly entitled to it, almost at home there, and he was not surprised about that. It was a beautiful house, set less than a kilometer above a small town on the lake’s eastern shore, with flower and vegetable gardens, columns and a fountain out front, and balconies on the second and third floors that offered views of the lake, and of the mountains on the western side, near the Swiss border. Vittoria and Enrico and the hired woman, Zenia, who cooked for them in exchange for her food, a place to live, and a bit of money, slept in a wing of the main house. Paolo took his meals there but asked to sleep in an outbuilding that must have been used by Brindisi’s servants before the war. The room there was luxurious compared to his room at the barn, and he slept well. He spent his days tending to the vegetable garden and fruit trees to one side of the house (Vittoria worked in the flower garden to the other side) and taking long walks with Enrico up into the hills, or fishing with him from one of the piers that jutted out into the lake.
Since there was only so much work to do around the property, he found that he was spending more time in prayer. He prayed for forgiveness for the things he’d done; for the souls of the people he’d killed—directly or otherwise; for Vittoria’s mother, Celeste, whose name he still had not spoken aloud, all these many years. The house was far enough away from any main road or important town that there was no Nazi presence, and so far, at least, the four of them had been left alone. Perhaps it had to do with the house’s isolation, or with the reputation of the late owner of the property—a “friend of the Reich,” the evil captain had called him, but who could possibly know if that were true? Or perhaps it was because, if Paolo understood the news correctly, at least some Italians were now fighting on the side of the Allies. All over Europe, Zenia told him, the German army was losing ground. So perhaps the Nazi soldiers had other things to worry about.
From time to time Paolo thought of the grapes rotting on the vines at home, an entire harvest, lost. And he often wondered what had happened to Marcellina and the others; where the men of the barn—Carlo especially—might be fighting if they were still alive; what Antonio and Eleonora were doing, and where. But he was coming to understand that it was the nature of war to ruin the earth and to separate people, to keep their fates unknown to the ones who loved them, and to fill the minds of the living with various kinds of fear, regret, shame, and anger, and deprive them of all but the most fleeting moments of peace. He prayed every day for the German surrender.
Whenever he sat with Vittoria on one of the benches that looked down over the lake, or took a stroll with her in the warm evenings (sometimes she’d hook her arm inside his elbow), he could feel both her love for him, and that a difficult conversation hovered around them, secrets swirling, questions tapping at their ears. He’d resolved to wait until she asked, and then he would tell her everything. Everything she wanted to know. Much of the time she seemed sad and preoccupied, and he understood that. Like all three of them, she was still recovering from the trauma at the vineyard, still hoping for news from Carlo. Although, if there were any news, how would it reach them?
On that late October day, sunny but with a cool breeze sweeping off the lake, Vittoria was on the far side of the house, choosing a selection of autumn flowers for the dinner table. Paolo had done what work he could do around the property—pulling out the tomato plants and using seeds he’d found in the shed to plant a cover crop of winter rye—and was sitting tiredly on one of the benches, looking down at the lake. He could see Enrico there, fishing patiently from the end of a pier, having no success. And then, for some reason, Paolo’s eyes were pulled to the left, south, along the paved, unlined road that ran parallel to the water and connected their little town with the next one down the shore. He saw a figure walking slowly along there. A man it was, young, wearing something across part of his face and limping as if the bottoms of his feet were blistered. The man’s shoulders and the way he swung his arms seemed familiar, and for a moment Paolo didn’t understand why. He stood up, studying him intently now. The man stopped and put his hands to either side of his mouth, as if calling to someone. Paolo couldn’t hear what he said, but he saw Enrico whirl around and then drop his fishing pole right into the water, and go sprinting back along the pier and then down the road.